My Most Anticipated Movie of 2018 was not Infinity War. It wasn’t Solo: A Star Wars Story. It certainly wasn’t that terrible looking remake of Overboard. No, the movie I wanted to see, more than anything, was Deadpool 2.

Now that I’ve seen it? Well, it was fun to watch. I enjoyed it for the most part. But one disappointment, in particular, kept me from loving the film.

Somewhat recently, The Dark ran a successful Kickstarter campaign that not only secured funding for two more years, but also raised their pay rates from .03 to .06 cents a word, making them a pro-paying magazine. This is awesome news because The Dark is a fantastic magazine publishing awesome work you should definitely check out, but I’m mostly bringing it up now because I–with a lack of cool crafty skills or, honestly, much else to offer–once again volunteered a movie review or pop culture essay as one of the possible Kickstarter rewards. Alas, there really is only one person out there who has both the interest and the means to purchase these reviews.

Tom, the fiend, spent a good twenty minutes gleefully telling me about all the movies he almost made me watch. Honestly, I was kinda hoping he’d land on Cannonball Run II, mostly because I’ve never seen the first one and I thought that could be pretty funny. Finally, however, he told it to me straight: of all the horrible films he could’ve chosen, Tom actually picked a movie he thought I would like and was shocked I hadn’t seen yet: Blade Runner 2049.

And I was grateful for that . . . until I saw the run time was 2 hours and 44 minuteslong.

I’ve been having a great time watching TOS with my sister, but I’ve also been a tiny bit disappointed that, overall, my reactions to most episodes have been somewhere between “meh” and “NO.” Not exactly shocked, mind; I know what a critical bastard I am, but still: I’m a nerd, and nerds are made for liking things. Going into this episode, I was really hoping to have more of a “hell yeah” reaction.

Good morning, all. Today is my sister’s birthday, and really, what better gift can one give than the snarky over-analyzation of a beloved science fiction classic? In today’s episode of TOS, we have it all: a sexy psychologist, the first Vulcan mind meld, a boatload of unethical psychiatry, and a weird dude in a box.

I’ll talk more about this when I get to “City on the Edge of Forever,” I’m sure, but I’ve found that TOS sometimes starts an episode seemingly heading in one direction, only to rapidly change course and end up somewhere wildly different. Case in point: “Miri,” an episode that, on first glance, appears to be about the mystery of a duplicate Earth, until TOS is like, nah, we don’t really feel like solving that particular storyline; how about we do Kirk vs The Lost Boys instead, with, like, a weird epidemic and some quasi-immortality thrown in?